Tagged: crime melodrama

From the 1960 Highsmith novel with the same English language title, This Sweet Sickness is a 1977 film by Claude Miller starring Gérard Depardieu and Miou-Moui. It’s perhaps the most delirious narrative of all the screenings in this Highsmith season, ending in a full-blown fantasy sequence.

David (Gérard Depardieu) is an accountant at a company in Central France. A typical Highsmith anti-hero, he ‘lives a lie’ – each weekend heading for Chamonix in the French Alps where he claims he is visiting his parents in a nursing home. In fact they are dead and he is secretly building/furnishing a chalet for his childhood sweetheart Lise (Dominique Laffin). Unfortunately she married someone else when David was away for two years (military service?) and is now pregnant with her first child. The film’s French title translates as ‘Tell Him/Her, I love Him/Her” which is intriguing and seems more informative that Highsmith’s original English title. This is because David himself is being pursued by Juliette (Miou-Miou) – and she in turn is being chased by David’s colleague François (Christian Clavier) who is attempting to cheat on his wife.

Juliette (Miou-Miou) and François (Christian Clavier)

Claude Miller directed the film and co-wrote the screenplay with Luc Béraud. While keeping the central characters and the opening narrative close to Highsmith’s story (i.e. the book’s plot as reported on Wikipedia), Miller changed the second half in several ways. Not surprisingly perhaps, Highsmith did not like the adaptation. Miller, who died in 2012 just before his last film Thérèse Desqueyrouxwas shown at Cannes, was influenced by François Truffaut. Under Truffaut’s guidance he directed his first feature in 1976, so perhaps it isn’t surprising that aspects of Dites-lui que je l’aime seem to refer to Truffaut’s own interest in Hitchcock. At the beginning of the film David visits a cinema, sitting in front of Juliette who has recently moved into the same lodging-house. The screening is Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) and a cut takes us straight from the auditorium to Joan Fontaine on the screen as the new Mrs de Winter exploring Manderley, the de Winter house. Juliette will eventually explore David’s chalet in Chamonix and if you know Rebecca you won’t be surprised at the chalet’s destruction in Dites-lui que je l’aime.

Claude Miller’s film is indeed ‘filmic’ and there are several interesting images/sequences. A photo in the chalet from the 1950s shows David and Lise as children. It sits below the kite (named ‘Fergus’) that they used to fly together. Outside the chalet a boy and girl, roughly the age of the children in the photo, are playing a game of ‘Grandmother’s Footsteps’. Where have they come from? The chalet is quite isolated in the hills. David comes out and shoos them away. Later in the film he sees another pair of children playing the same game. Are these children real or a figment of David’s obsessive imagination? In David’s bedroom at the chalet, a print on the wall shows a young woman looking out at the viewer. I think this might be Vermeer’s ‘A Lady Standing at a Virginal’ – or something similar (I think she was the other way round)? I thought that the scenes outside the chalet in the snow were reminiscent of the final scenes of Truffaut’s Tirez sur le pianiste (1960).

David caught in the rain and behind the bars of the front gate of Lise’s house – the perfect image of a man trapped in his obsessive and doomed desire?

In 1977 Gérard Depardieu was well on the way to becoming the pre-eminent French film star – a status he had obtained by the early 1980s. I watched him only a few weeks ago in 1900 (Novecento) (1976) which was shot only a couple of years earlier and he seems to have put on a lot of weight in just two years. In the image at the top of this post, he still displays a youthful sensitivity and charm (the glasses remind me of James Dean), but at the same time he hints at the brutality and wildness he is capable of. This was all part of Depardieu’s star persona and would come to the fore when he toured the US in 1990 to promote Green Card. In Dites-lui que je l’aime he slaps, punches and throws both men and women and throws wine or water in their faces. This film is unusual for Highsmith because, apart from Carol (UK-US-France 2015), it is the only one to my knowledge to involve two leading female characters, one of whom (Juliette) is nearly as active an agent as David himself. There is a sense in which Highsmith might be seen as misogynistic in terms of her female characters, but here she is perhaps better seen as misanthropic. I did find the violence dished out by David quite shocking – possibly because he flared up so quickly and was out of control before his victims were aware of what was happening. One of the main victims is Juliette – who dishes out her own form of emotional violence. Depardieu and Miou-Miou had ‘form’ in this kind of emotional drama, in Les valseuses (1974), a film that also includes Isabelle Huppert and Brigitte Fossey, both of whom have appeared in the ‘Adapting Highsmith’ films.

Lise (Dominique Laffin) is sometimes difficult to tell apart from Juliette when both wear woollen hats that hide their hair. Lise is less ‘active’ than Juliette but still an agent in the drama.

In trying to classify this film, I can’t help thinking that it is a bit like ‘Truffaut-Hitcock on speed’ – it’s a psychological thriller, crime melodrama and emotional romance rolled into one. The performances of Depardieu, Miou-Miou and Claude Piéplu (who plays David’s eccentric neighbour) carry the energy that this mixture of repertoires suggests and I think this was perhaps the most enjoyable of the adaptations I’ve seen.

I must note (for Keith’s benefit) that the film was projected as 1.66:1, the standard European format for the period and that the digital copy we saw seemed to have been copied from a video source which hadn’t been properly ‘de-interlaced’ so that the image ‘feathered’ every now and again. But I confess that I found the film narrative to be riveting and I soon forgot about the image quality. I watched this in one of the smallest screens at HOME which was nearly full. The last HOME screening in the season is this coming Thursday and since it’s directed by Claude Chabrol I’ll be there early to get a good seat. Can’t wait, this has been an excellent season.

Ashwin Kumar (Irrfan Khan) examines a kukri. Could this be the murder weapon?

Here’s a good example of the new form of Indian cinema the (H)indie or ‘New Bollywood’ film. Talvar boasts two of the stars of crossover films in India in lead roles and a third in a cameo role. Irrfan Khan is now one of the best-known Indian stars worldwide after appearances in global blockbusters like The Life of Pi and Jurassic World, as well as both Indian independent and mainstream Bollywood films. Konkona Sen Sharma is known for Bengali films, Bollywood films and the independent films of her mother Aparna Sen. Tabu starred opposite Irrfan Khan in Mira Nair’s The Namesake (2006) and a host of other independent films as well as Bollywood films. Here she has a small role as the wife who Irrfan’s character is divorcing. The film is a directed by Meghna Gulzar with script and music from Vishal Bhardwaj, the director of acclaimed Shakespeare adaptations Maqbool (2003), Omkara (2006) and Haider (2014). Each of the three stars have worked with Bhardwaj before (Tabu and Irrfan Khan play the modern-day Macbeths in Maqbool) and Talvar appears as the production of friends who just happen to be Indian cinema aristocrats. I thought at first that this was a real ‘independent production’ because none of the major Indian (or Hollywood) media corporations was involved. Then I discovered that Junglee Films is actually the new ‘movie arm’ of the Times of India Group – which describes itself as “India’s biggest media corporation”, owning mainly print and broadcasting brands. This makes it surprising that the film has not so far been released in the UK and Junglee Films seeks to make films for ‘the diaspora market’ as well as the Indian film market. (See press notes.)

Nutan Tandon – the mother of the murdered girl – played by Konkona Sen Sharma

Talvar is what used to be known in Hollywood as a “torn from the headlines film”. In fact it is the fourth attempt to create a narrative inspired by a double murder case in Northern India in 2008. (See this Wikipedia page.) The story involves a dentist’s household in a ‘colony’ in the city of Noida – a modern planned city in the ‘Capital City Region’ of Delhi, known for its wealthy residents. When the cleaner comes in the early morning she finds the door locked and when she gets in she is faced with the distressed parents Ramesh (Neeraj Kabi) and Nutan (Konkona Sen Sharma) who have seemingly just discovered the body of their 14 year-old daughter lying on her bed with her throat cut. The police are called and an investigation begins – but it is not until some time later that a second body, the male household servant, is found on the roof terrace. The film then proceeds with what is often now referred to as a ‘Rashomon approach’ following Kurosawa Akira’s famous film in which the same incident is viewed from the several different perspectives of the characters involved.

The first investigation by the Uttar Pradesh Police is clumsy with evidence not collected, lost or damaged and a second investigation is ordered by the Central Bureau of Investigation. This team is led by Ashwin Kumar (Irrfan Kahn) a brilliant detective with some odd habits. His investigation offers a different suggestion as to who is guilty but he is then taken off the case and a second CBI team with another rather odd detective takes over and produces a third version of what actually happened. Finally, the new CBI Chief tries to make sense of what the three investigations have achieved before a judge takes over and prosecutes the parents.

The film is 132 minutes long – about standard for a Hollywood procedural with a similar plot. I did notice a point in the narrative where an ‘Intermission’ might have been placed for the Indian release. The film does use songs, but in the Western mode such as playing over a montage and not in the Bollywood manner, effectively pausing and reflecting on the narrative with choreographed dance moves. The film also has more of a sense of an ensemble cast, so that the stars are not constantly on screen. The question is whether Irrfan Khan’s star status (and undoubted on-screen charisma) means that we believe his character’s version of the events of the murder more than we do the others. This is important because the audience (in India at least) knows that the parents are in prison.

It isn’t difficult to see why the film has created so much interest in India. As well as the intriguing puzzle of a version of the old ‘locked room’ murder case, the film offers a form of commentary on several aspects of contemporary Indian society. The Indian police have a very bad reputation for brutal treatment of suspects, the senior officers and government officials are depicted as covering for each other as part of a club culture and the perennial question of Indian bureaucracy comes up in relation to evidence. A more specific discourse here deals with a Nepalese migrant community in North India where suspicion of minorities from the North and East appears rife (the dead house servant is Nepalese). And in all of this the divorce of Ashwin and Reema (Irrfan Khan and Tabu) seems particularly poignant. I have seen stories which involve campaigns to investigate murders and seek redress and I’ve seen films which depict legal procedures in India but I don’t think I’ve seen a detailed police procedural before and not one that involves family relationships in this way. The media coverage/intrusion seems almost lost in the midst of everything else. It’s almost as if there is too much to fit in and I would like to see the film again to fully understand how it works. I’m sure, however, that this is a very important film and I hope a UK distributor decides to pick it up.

Sandu Patrescu (Theodor Corban, left) confronts his neighbour (Iulian Postelnicu) who has commissioned him to undertake a seemingly meaningless change of vehicle registration.

The Romanian ‘New Wave’ which started to have a major impact on the festival circuit in 2004 has been one of the strengths of the Leeds Film Festival for several years and this was evident in the healthy audience for an afternoon screening in this year’s festival. Unfortunately it’s one of the recent film movements that I haven’t really caught up with (the unwatched DVDs are on my shelves waiting for my attention – lack of time rather than interest). As a result perhaps, I was not alert enough to spot the crucial significance of a scene early in the film and the result was that I felt slightly cheated and frustrated at the end. The fault is mine, not the film’s.

Radu Muntean is a central figure in the New Wave and this, his fifth feature, was shown at Cannes this year in the Un certain regard strand. The central character is Patrascu (Teodor Corban, an actor associated with New Wave films). Muntean presents to us the daily incidents of Patrascu’s life – taking his dog Jerry for exercise in the park, squabbling with his young teenage son who is obsessed with videogames and Facebook and then doing his job. Patrascu and his wife run a small business which provides a service to iron out the tedium and bureaucracy involved in registering motor vehicles in Romania. It took me a while to work this out since the first job appeared to involve a film production company. The important narrative incident occurs when Parascu hears shouts and bangs in the apartment below in his block. He stops to listen but then decides it’s not his business. Later it transpires that a young woman has died in the apartment. Questioned by the police, Patrascu says nothing. We presume that in Romania the legacy of Ceaușescu’s brutal repression is such that 25 years later middle-aged people like Patrescu are still careful about what they say. The bureaucracy that provides Patrescu with a living must be part of this legacy as well – as is the network of contacts that he methodically maintains. He can queue-jump on behalf of his clients mainly because of these contacts. At other times though Patrescu shows himself to be an ‘ethical man’, e.g. in his support of the girl who has died when others start to repeat gossip about her.

The narrative moves into its final phase when a young neighbour asks Patrascu to re-register his vehicle and then wheedles his way into Patrascu’s household, befriending his wife and son – offering them advice on a new computer etc. You can probably work out what eventually happens – it was because I didn’t recognise who this neighbour was that I literally ‘lost the plot’ at this point. When I realised what was happening I felt rather stupid. It occurs to me that this film has some similarities to Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and that film’s mix of a police procedural and a drama about relationships in families and communities. One Floor Below doesn’t approach the epic scope and narrative complexity of Ceylan’s work, but its focus on ‘smaller’ stories is just as valid and I should have got more from this than I did. Reading other comments on the film, however, I see that I was not alone in missing aspects of the narrative and that’s going to be a risk in making films like this.

This was the first film I saw in Glasgow and a great way to start my festival viewing – with an intelligent and taut Italian crime film. Anime nere focuses on the ‘ndrangheta, the criminal families of Calabria in the deep south of Italy. The film begins on the waterfront in Amsterdam (which is not identified) where Luigi, one of three Carbone brothers is negotiating a major drugs deal with a Spanish group. Back on a mountain top near the Calabrian village of Africo, Luigi’s nephew Leo is fed up with his father Luciano who has opted out of crime to concentrate on the farm and his goats. Leo decides to head off on the long train journey north to Milan where he meets up with Luigi and the third brother, Rocco, the ‘accountant’ in the criminal business.

The ‘inciting incident’ in the narrative turns out to be the hot-headed Leo’s piece of minor vandalism carried out in his home village. It soon becomes clear that the Carbone’s rivals have just been looking for an excuse and a full-blown turf war is about to break out.

But it doesn’t – or at least not in the way that might be expected. This is more gangster as art film than gangster as TheGodfather. Francesco Munzi’s film, based on a novel by Gioacchino Criaco is quite slow and it is deadly serious. Anyone who is a fan of the Italian TV crime series InspectorMontalbano will find this film both familiar but also disturbing. The connection is first via the actor who plays Rocco – Peppino Mazzotta – and who also plays Fazio, the Inspector’s ‘go to’ Lieutenant. But it’s also in the depiction of the desolate farms and abandoned villages of Sicily and Calabria. In the TV series it is played with some humour, but not here. There are several subtexts about the rural South and the sophisticated North and about the power of family ties and codes of honour – which of course are increasingly out of place in the global crime business.

The film doesn’t end as you might expect and throughout the violence is minimal with the worst bits off screen. But the tension is great throughout and you always expect something to happen. Vertigo are listed as UK distributors so I hope this gets into cinemas. Highly recommended if you are a fan of the European crime film – but give it a miss if you just like gunfights and sharp suits.

Tomasz Wasilewski, writer-director of United States of Love is a name to watch. Born in 1980 he has produced a narrative set in a Polish town in 1990. The English title of the film is ironic in two ways. It could be read as a comment directed at the desire of Poles in 1990 for … Continue reading →

I’m glad I finally got to see this at a public screening (thanks to Square Chapel, Halifax). The Commune is partly a nostalgia trip for those of us who lived through the 1970s – though I was younger than the main characters, I can still recognise the world depicted here (meant to be 1975). Co-writer/director … Continue reading →

Pablo Trapero is one of the most successful filmmakers working in Argentina today. To underline that status, his latest film to get a UK release was co-produced by the Almodóvars’ company El Deseo. It won the Silver Lion at Venice in 2015 and had the biggest ever opening box office take for any film in Argentina, … Continue reading →

For reasons I don’t fully understand, the Japanese director Naomi Kawase divides film critics and audiences. A regular presence at Cannes, her films have until recently been seen only at festivals in much of the English-speaking world. It wasn’t until Still the Water from 2014 that she achieved a UK release. Despite all her international … Continue reading → […]

At a time when the number of films directed by women has become a major issue in the anglophone world, it’s worth noting that in France things have moved on considerably. In a review of Mon Roi (2015) by the actor-director Maïwenn (Sight & Sound, July 2016), Ginette Vincendeau makes the point that currently over … Continue reading →

World Cinema Through Global Genres, William V. Constanzo, John Wiley 2014, £21.99, 432pp ISBN 9781118712924 The US publisher John Wiley now has a major global brand for academic and professional texts after its 2007 merger with Oxford-based Blackwell. This means that there is now UK promotion for a Wiley US textbook like this title. In … Continue reading → […]

Email Subscription

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

The Labour leadership election appears to have got the UK press and broadcasting media in a real tizz. One of the most aggravating aspects of the reporting is the constant appendage of ‘left-wing’ to any reference to Jeremy Corbyn. He is … Continue reading →

The 10th anniversary of the ‘7/7 bombings’ in 2005 in London saw a range of remembrance events across the UK. These resulted in a great deal of media coverage. One BBC radio reporter referred to the four young bombers and … Continue reading →

The local elections in England last week produced two examples of quandaries for broadcasters. The big story for the BBC and other commentators was the rise of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), led by a curiously charismatic Nigel Farage. UKIP are … Continue reading →

Hinterland is a good example of the global/local. Like some other modern states the UK has statutory requirements and cultural policies that protect the other languages in the Home Nations and this means support for both Welsh and Gaelic broadcasters … Continue reading →